Measure impact and tune

Use a short list of questions to
select the KPIs needed to tune your automation strategy.

Effective automation is not a one‑time project but an ongoing process
that looks for new opportunities and identifies where automation is
(or isn’t) delivering value. ServiceNow Performance Analytics provides
access to several out‑of‑the‑box KPIs that can help you measure
opportunities to improve and tune your incident and change management
automation strategy. See Tables 3 and 4 for incident and change
management KPIs and how you can use them to tune your automation.

KEY PERFORMANCE INDICATORS

HOW TO TUNE YOUR AUTOMATION STRATEGY

• Average age of the last update of open incidents

• Percentage of open incidents not updated in the last 30 days

• Number of open incidents not updated in the last 5 days

• Number of open incidents not updated in the last 30 days

• Summed age of last update of open incidents

• Percentage of open overdue incidents

• Number of open overdue incidents

Review your business rules (and team KPIs) for incident notification,
routing, and escalation.

• Average age of the last update of open incidents

• Percentage of incidents closed by self-service

• Number of incidents closed by self-service

• New/open workloads

• Incident backlog growth

Ensure your knowledge base reflects the most common self-service use
cases for end users and provides clear guidance.

• Percentage of open incidents reassigned at least once

• Average reassignment of open incidents

• Summed reassignment of open incidents

• Percentage of incidents resolved without reassignment

• Number of reassigned open incidents

• Number of open incidents unassigned

Review the business rules (and team KPIs) for incident routing and escalation.

• Number of incidents not solved

• Percentage of incidents not solved

Ensure the knowledge base reflects the most current guidance for
known errors.

• Average resolution time of resolved incidents

• Average close time of incidents

Identify primary drivers for incident cycle time: A lack of current
guidance in the knowledge base may require unnecessary escalation, or
your business rules for notification, routing, and escalation may
require updating to reflect the fastest path to resolution.

Build pre-authorized templates to increase the availability
of standardchanges in the change catalog.

• Number of unsuccessful changes

Reevaluate risk assessment: Determine whether you need to make
adjustments to business rules in the Change Risk Calculator or to the
risk assessment questions for change requesters.

• Number of reassigned open changes

• Percentage of open changes reassigned at least once

• Average reassignment of open changes

• Summed reassignment of open changes

Review change request assignment rules for validity.

• Average age of open changes

• Summed age of open changes

• Average age of “updated since of” open changes

• Summed age of “updated since of” open changes

Build pre-authorized templates to increase the availability of
standard changes in the change catalog.

Identify the change state (see Table 1) where open changes spend the most
time. Based on the change state, determine whether you need to make
changes to the business rules for change risk assessment, change
request assignment, or approvals and scheduling.

You don’t have to use all of the KPIs reflected in Tables 3 and 4—and
there are more KPIs that you can use to track the performance of
incident and change management. What’s most important is that you
select and use KPIs that can provide directional guidance about where
you can improve your automation. If a KPI begins to trend negatively,
the process owner and team should know how to respond.

Here’s an example: Your organization may decide to monitor change
backlog growth as an indicator of the efficiency of your change
management process. If the change backlog grows—potentially slowing
down necessary maintenance and enhancement activities—the team should
determine if the backlog growth is the result of a manual slowdown in
the overall process. One potential root cause is an increase in the
ratio of normal changes—those requiring CAB approval—from
standard changes with pre‑authorized approval. In this case,
the team should look to increase the number of standard changes made
available in a change catalog, through the development of
pre‑authorized templates, for changes with a successful track record.

To identify the right KPIs to guide automation tuning, ask the
following questions:

What business rules have we put in place to guide our
automation? For incident management, this should include how
incidents are categorized, as well as the rules for routing,
escalation, and notification. For change management, this should
include rules governing risk assessment, routing and approvals, and
scheduling.

What knowledge have we made available as part of our automation
plan? This should include your knowledge base (for service desk
agents as well as end users) and a change catalog for standard
changes.

What changes in performance do we expect to see as the result of
our automation plan? Teams should ask how a business rule, set
of business rules, or publication of knowledge is intended to change
performance. This should relate to your overall goals for the
process and organization. For example, a team may design business
rules for incident management prioritization such that high‑severity
incidents are autogenerated based on alerts for business‑critical
services. The intent behind this is to speed incident remediation
for business‑critical services, meaning that the team should look
for reductions in the MTTR for incidents for business‑critical
services.

If we don’t see the change we want, what do we need to tune?
If the team aligns the right KPIs to business rules and
publication of knowledge, you then have clarity on where to look
first to improve your automation. In the example outlined above,
let’s assume that the MTTR for incidents affecting business‑critical
services refused to budge—or, worse, got longer. The team should
first investigate whether automation is working—was the rule that
autogenerates alerts for business‑critical services written
correctly? Some business‑critical services may not have been
identified correctly in the CMDB, or alert generation may not be
triggering the right service desk workflows. No KPI provides an
immediate solution, but it can guide the team on where to look first
to find one.

EXPERT TIP

More metrics does not equal better metrics. Select a small set of
KPIs that your process owners and teams readily understand and that
give consistent directional guidance on process improvement. If teams
don’t know what to do to move a KPI, then it needs reevaluation.